CAIRO, Sept. 24 — The death of more than 160 people in the sinking of an overloaded ship off Egypt’s Mediterranean city of Rosetta has once again focused world attention on the plight of refugees and migrants.

In a few hours, the foreign ministers of the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the European Union are scheduled to gather at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, in northwest United States.

A health ministry spokesman said Shaima al-Sabbagh died of birdshot wounds, which fellow protesters said were fired by police to disperse the march. Al Sabbagh who was said to be … with a five year old son, was shot while she peacefully marched towards the Tahrir Square to lay a commemorative wreath of roses.

Egyptian activists shared graphic images of Ms. Sabbagh’s last moments on social networks Photographs and video recorded before the police moved in seemed to show the protesters, including Ms Sabbagh, standing peacefully outside the Air France KLM office in Talaat Harb Square near Tahrir. As officers charged at the protesters guns drawn shots rang out and Ms. Sabbagh fell to the pavement. Al-Sabbagh was taken to a hospital where she was declared dead.

Prior to the meetings, the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights addressed an open letter to both candidates, asking them “to reconsider the false dichotomy between Egyptian citizens’ rights and freedoms and the country’s security threats.” …

Human rights under Sisi

A year after a military coup in Egypt deposed then-President Mohammad Morsi in 2013, Sisi was elected President of Egypt. Despite his status as the country’s first democratically-elected leader, Morsi was widely disliked by many Egyptians who say he prioritized his party, the Muslim Brotherhood, over Egypt. Many of his largest critics were leftists or human rights advocates, but these same critics are facing even harsher crack downs under Sisi.

Sisi’s reign has witnessed the arrest, disappearance, and death of multiple critics of his regime. Egypt is one of the world’s worst offenders when it comes to arresting journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and has cracked down heavily on critics of the Sisi regime’s human rights record.

Hundreds of Egyptians have disappeared or been tortured, or both, under Sisi’s rule, Amnesty International reported in July. Most recently, an Egyptian court froze the assets of five prominent human rights defenders and three NGOs.

“Egypt’s current government (meaning Sisi but also all the institutions/groups that participated in the coup and now back him) sees itself as being in an existential struggle, and it regards (entirely justified) complaints about horrible human rights records as a defense of those individuals who are trying to bring it down and, to put a finer point on this, kill it,” Eric Trager, the Esther K. Wagner Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), told ThinkProgress over email.

“The government is extremely paranoid,” he added, and “it makes it impossible to have a serious conversation with it about human rights.”

Bringing human rights to the table

There is a desire from many analysts to see American politicians dispense with the lauding of Sisi.

To date, Secretary of State John Kerry has fairly regularly praised the Egyptian government. This position has garnered plenty of criticism from analysts.

“Kerry has repeatedly [praised] Sisi over the past several years, maintaining this idea that Egypt and Sisi are on some sort of democratic transition,” Hamid said. “This is problematic because it is not true.”

During the primaries, then-candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) praised Sisi and cited him as an “example of a Muslim [leader] we ought to be standing with.”

“Any politician who hails Sisi as a good Muslim leader doesn’t know what they’re talking about and is beyond absurdity,” Hamid said. …

Since taking power, Sisi’s focus has been on increasing security in Egypt through strict counterterrorism measures. But his efforts have largely failed to bear fruit as there has been an increase in terrorism in Egypt since the coup in 2013, and ISIS has established a solid presence in the Sinai. These failures point to the shortcomings in Sisi’s security-driven approach, and Hamid believes the next American president shouldn’t separate human rights from American strategic interests.

The advent of script has never managed to eliminate the use of symbols. This is the finding of research carried out by Kyra van der Moezel on Ancient Egyptian identity marks. PhD defence 7 September.

Van der Moezel studied identity marks from the settlement at Deir el-Medina, on the west bank of the Nile. This is where some 40 to 120 workers and their families lived between 1550 and 1070 BC. These were the workers who built and decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, where the legendary King Tutankhamen is buried, along with other pharaohs and elites.

Funny signs

More than three thousand years later Deir el-Medina reveals a wealth of archaeological information. An exceptional number of written sources have been found covering trade, the law, religion and literature. Researchers have also found a large number of identity marks, often imprinted on potsherds or as graffiti on the rock walls of the necropolis. For a long time scientists had no idea how to interpret all these symbols, so they were dubbed very unscientifically ‘funny signs’.

Pictograms

‘Under the guidance of lecturer Ben Haring we have now managed to interpret most of these symbols,’ Van der Moezel explains. ‘You can compare them to pictograms today, like information symbols at airports or product logos. They all have an inherent meaning, but are not related by any linguistic rules. The rules governing how words and sentences are formed don’t apply here. The symbols use other means of expressing information.’

Van der Moezel and her colleagues distinguish different types of identity marks. Some symbols appear to be geometrical and use squares, triangles or circles, while others were derived from the written language. Finally, the Leiden researchers also found images of beings and objects that in terms of their function are comparable with the symbols that we use today in WhatsApp.

‘These pictograms depict images of animals, objects or professions, for example,’ says Van der Moezel. ‘They were used in two different ways. First of all metonymically, whereby the symbol refers directly to what the person who drew it wanted to convey. The scorpion hunter of Deir el-Medina, for example, was represented by a scorpion symbol. The Egyptians also used the pictograms metaphorically. A well-known Egyptian metaphor is, for example, ‘as fast as a jackal’, which could explain why a worker is represented by the image of a jackal.’

Continued existence

Surprisingly enough, the identity signs continued to exist even after the workers started to make more use of writing. Van der Moezel: ‘People often assume that identity signs are ‘more primitive’ than written language, and that writing will slowly but surely take over from symbols. However, what we see is that writing and symbols continue to exist alongside one another. There is some interchange between the two, but symbols have never been ousted as a means of communication. Symbols continue to be useful because you can express a lot more in a single symbol than in a letter or a word.’

Symbolizing Identity

Van der Moezel’s PhD is part of a larger project entitled Symbolizing Identity. Identity Marks and their Relation to Writing in New Kingdom Egypt, managed by Dr Ben Haring. Haring was awarded a subsidy in 2011 by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) to conduct this research.

Tuesday’s verdict is not final and could be overturned by a higher court.

Tiran and Sanafir are uninhabited islands, situated at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, a strategically important part of the Red Sea that is bordered by Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

President Sisi‘s decision in April to cede control of them sparked widespread unrest and criticism. King Salman had announced a multi-billion dollar aid package to Egypt from Saudi Arabia on his visit, leading some to accuse Mr Sisi of “selling” the islands.

On Tuesday, Egypt’s State Council, an administrative court which oversees lawsuits filed against the government, quashed Mr Sisi’s decision by issuing a verdict annulling a maritime borders agreement.

Cheers in court: By Sally Nabil, BBC News

The maritime border agreement signed earlier this year between Egypt and Saudi Arabia took many Egyptians by surprise.

Since then, protesters have taken to the streets calling the arrangement unconstitutional, and accusing the government of giving away Egyptian territories in return for aid packages and investments worth billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia, a strong backer of President Sisi.

Some of these protesters were arrested and charged with disrupting public order. A few are still behind bars.

The lawsuit was filed by a number of prominent human rights lawyers, headed by a former presidential candidate, Khaled Ali.

When the verdict was issued, many cheered inside the courtroom, chanting “the islands are Egyptian”. But the legal battle has not come to an end yet, because the decision can be appealed.

The verdict stated that the two islands would “remain under Egyptian sovereignty”.

If it is approved by the country’s High Administrative Court it will become legally binding.

Scholars have long discussed the introduction and spread of iron metallurgy in different civilizations. The sporadic use of iron has been reported in the Eastern Mediterranean area from the late Neolithic period to the Bronze Age. Despite the rare existence of smelted iron, it is generally assumed that early iron objects were produced from meteoritic iron. Nevertheless, the methods of working the metal, its use, and diffusion are contentious issues compromised by lack of detailed analysis.

Since its discovery in 1925, the meteoritic origin of the iron dagger blade from the sarcophagus of the ancient Egyptian King Tutankhamun (14th C. BCE) has been the subject of debate and previous analyses yielded controversial results. We show that the composition of the blade (Fe plus 10.8 wt% Ni and 0.58 wt% Co), accurately determined through portable x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, strongly supports its meteoritic origin.

In agreement with recent results of metallographic analysis of ancient iron artifacts from Gerzeh, our study confirms that ancient Egyptians attributed great value to meteoritic iron for the production of precious objects. Moreover, the high manufacturing quality of Tutankhamun‘s dagger blade, in comparison with other simple-shaped meteoritic iron artifacts, suggests a significant mastery of ironworking in Tutankhamun‘s time.

Jess Worth, a member of campaign group BP or not BP? said: “The British Museum says this new exhibition will ‘tell stories of political power and popular belief, myth and migration’ — and it does. BP’s sponsorship is a story of gaining favour with repressive regimes, extracting fossil fuels and driving the rising sea levels that will cause people to flee sinking cities in the future.

“That story is already unfolding in Egypt. Meanwhile, the British Museum peddles the myth that BP is generous and ethical when it displays the company’s logos.”

Tiran (Arabic: جزيرة تيران‎ Jazīrat Tīrān, aka Jezîret Tīrān and Yotvat Island, is an Egyptian-administered island that is also claimed by Saudi Arabia. It is located at the entrance of the Straits of Tiran, which separates the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aqaba. It has an area of about 80 km2 (30 sq mi). It is part of the Ras Muhammad National Park. … The island is currently inhabited only by military personnel from Egypt and the Multinational Force and Observers [MFO].

An Egyptian court sentenced 152 protesters on Saturday to between two and five years in prison each after they demonstrated against a decision to transfer two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia, judicial sources and state media said.

Hundreds of police officers were deployed in central Cairo on April 25 to quell protests against President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi‘s decision to hand over Tiran and Sanafir islands.

More than 200 people are being tried in connection with the protests, the judicial sources said.

Of those sentenced on Saturday, 101 received five-year prison terms and 51 received two-year sentences, judicial sources and the state-owned al-Ahram newspaper said.

The 152 protesters were convicted of breaking a law banning people from protesting without first notifying the Interior Ministry, the judicial sources said.

Defense lawyer Ahmed Helmy said they would appeal. “There is no evidence of guilt,” he told Reuters.

The prosecution did not issue any formal statement on the verdicts.

In similar protests, on April 15, thousands of people had called for “the fall of the regime”, a slogan from the 2011 uprisings which ended Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule … More than 100 people were detained at those protests, security officials said at the time.